With Matt, TomH and Firefishy all ducking out, who was left to map Peckham last night? As it turned out we had great mixture of people with some mapping party regulars, some new faces, and some other familiar characters from the OpenStreetMap community.

>> Photos <<

Scott Day, who does the maps at SouthWark Council, had arranged to meet me while I was out and about mapping the cake slice 4. This turned out to be an evil tangled nest of modern housing estates with footways going in all directions, and what with half concentrating on chatting with Scott, I got fairly lost and probably didn't manage to map it very systematically, but I got quite a few photos of housing estate maps (That old cheat)

Tom Chance lives locally, so it was nice to be able to hand over responsibility for pub choice and cake diagram. Dankarran was also along.

Bar Story was an cool venue. A departure from our usual standard pub. Funky music inside, but for the sake of map chat, we sat ourselves outside on some funky railway sleeper seating, which later on turned out to be pretty close to the funky raging bonfire!

Lots of map chat related to Local Councils. Scott Day has an very interesting insider perspective, and he is going to be researching the possibilities around OpenStreetMap for Local Councils. Tom Chance is one of the people behind the excellent Sutton Green Map. That along with his other political work, means he knows all about local councils too.

We talked about government Ordnance Survey dependency, and about the kinds of "GIS" technology councils use. We have some work to do improving OSM's interoperability with those kinds of systems. The "GIS industry" is really a whole mysterious other world, where our open source development tends to focus more around the "neo-geo" free and open map tools, but I'm guessing we (the OSM community) do have a fair amount of collective wisdom on these topics. I created a wiki page about MapInfo for example, pulling in whatever I could find from the mailing list and other wiki pages. Know anything more? Edit the page!

It's great that our map data is starting to arouse some serious interest from London borough councils where our completeness is starting to look pretty good. Imagine if a council outside of London (and outside the Yahoo zone) would get their bin lorries and social care workers etc to gather GPS traces. We'll probably need a London borough to show some compelling end use cases to motivate this.

Meanwhile let's work on the completeness! It's the Bromley and Sidcup Mapping Party on the weekend of June 13th 14th. Which means we'll be venturing deep in to orange NoNamed zone!

Before that though I'm heading up to Yorkshire this weekend, and taking in the
Pateley Bridge Mapping Party whilst I'm there.